đ Getting inside your customerâs mind; Avoid feast or famine sales months; Getting real about growth...
Silicon Valley vet Bret Waters told the story of a recent, unfortunate investor meeting thatâs worth sharing. The founder had a great product in a rapidly growing space â all was going great until it came to questions, which he avoided in favor of jumping into a product demo. Breaking your presentationâs flow to answer questions may be annoying, but remember, the most important thing you can do is listen and address their needs. And after youâve handled their questions, donât be afraid to flip the script a bit and ask the investor some of your own.
đŽ Psychic powers would be pretty awesome for the marketing team... instead of relying on conversations with customers, you could immediately know what theyâre looking for. Weâve come to terms with the fact that weâll never be mind readers, but luckily there are other ways to get inside your customerâs heads. This is going to sound harsh, but the first step is understanding that nobody cares about you or your product; taking that mindset helps develop empathy for your customers and non-attachment towards your product. Secondly, remember to ask the hard questions. Thereâs little value in all positive feedback - the biggest opportunities are in finding out what drives customers away from your product.
đ¨ď¸ When it comes to forecasting, we are seeing more startups incorporate scenario planning into their strategy. It allows teams to map out future problems the business is likely to encounter, all in one consolidated view. While no two frameworks for these scenarios will be the same, there are few commonalities to make sure youâre leveraging these experiments effectively. Outline your scenarios by identifying value drivers and variables while prioritizing the two or three key drivers. Also, keep in mind that scenarios are not sensibility tests. Theyâre stories and should be kept feasible, consistent, and future-oriented while relating to the external business environment.Â
â The concept of OKRs seems simple at first glance â itâs just setting goals and identifying the results you can expect from accomplishing them. As simple as it sounds, theyâre notoriously hard to get right and actually implement. Unlike your standard KPIs, what OKRs are measuring is progress and how well companies move the needle towards their specific goals. As we mentioned last week with the North Star metric, the successful rollout of OKRs is contingent on how well each team understands each top-level goal and their role in achieving it. This is particularly important for companies moving into the scale phase because operations are moving rapidly. It fosters the âcommon goalâ mindset, encourages experimentation, and allows quick changes when initiatives arenât going as planned.
đ Business development is a wild ride, especially in the current business ecosystem. Often reps find themselves on the far ends of the spectrum, either smashing their goals or struggling to keep their head above water. Falling into the feast or famine trap of sales is easy to do but completely avoidable. Realistically evaluating where youâre spending the bulk of your efforts and eliminating low-value activities is a great place to start. If you look at your sales process in those terms, itâs pretty easy to determine which activities are a time suck. Automating or outsourcing them can do wonders for your numbers. Another winning strategy is to find your niche and lean in. Become razor-focused on how your product solves for that demographic.
đ We caught growth guru Elena Vernaâs recent interview on the SaaS Revolution podcast, which is worth a listen. As Elena describes, growth is a goal that all companies want, but very few understand what the term means, how to achieve it sustainably, and when is the right time to prioritize it. One of the biggest takeaways was rethinking how we develop growth teams. We optimize growth teams for success most of the time, which is the endgame, but really growth teams should optimize for learning (she tells them to expect failure at least 50% of the time). It's through those failures that teams can learn where the biggest opportunities are. Â